Khaled Hosseini Quotes

“A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.”

“That was when Baba stood up. It was my turn to clamp a hand on his thigh, but Baba pried it loose, snatched his leg away. When he stood, he eclipsed the moonlight. ‘I want you to ask this man something,’ Baba said. He said it to Karim, but looked directly at the Russian officer. ‘Ask him where his shame is.’ They spoke. ‘He says this is war. There is no shame in war.’ ‘Tell him he’s wrong. War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.‘”

“With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.”

“That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.”

‘‘‘I know,’ he said, breaking our embrace. ‘Inshallah, we’ll celebrate later. Right now, I’m going to run that blue kite for you,’ he said. He dropped the spool and took off running, the hem of his green chapan dragging in the snow behind him. ‘Hassan!’ I called. ‘Come back with it!’ He was already turning the street corner, his rubber boots kicking up snow. He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘For you a thousand times over!’ he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner. The next time I saw him smile unabashedly like that was twenty-six years later, in a faded Polaroid photograph.”

“Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended.”

“Marriage can wait, education cannot.”

“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”

“Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”

“A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.”

“Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.”

“A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing, Mariam. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed. It won’t stretch to make room for you.”

“Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”

“You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.”

“Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.”

“And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.”

“Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.”

“Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.”

“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”

“Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.”

“Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. *As a reminder of how people like us suffer,* she’d said. *How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.*”

“The Chinese say it’s better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.”

“But the game involves only male names. Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her.”

“She would never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.”

“Tell your secret to the wind, but don’t blame it for telling the trees.”

“Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every sin is a variation of theft.”

“Then he saw me and waved. Smiled. He motioned for me to wear my mortarboard, and took a picture of me with the school’s clock tower in the background. I smiled for him – in a way, this was his day more than mine. He walked to me, curled his arm around my neck, and gave my brow a single kiss. ‘I am moftakhir, Amir,’ he said. Proud. His eyes gleamed when he said that and I liked being on the receiving end of that look.”

“Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.”

“‘I’m sorry,’ Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.”

“A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her.”

“You can not stop you from being who you are.”

“I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t. I just watched. Paralyzed.”

“But I hope you will heed this: A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.”

“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime…”

“And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”

“Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.”

“My body was broken—just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later—but I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed.”

“Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything”

“Some stories don’t need telling.”

“For me America was a place to bury memories. For Baba a place to mourn his.”

“You’ve always been a tourist here, you just didn’t know it.”